Episode 245 - Transcript
So there’s a pretty innocent statement that I want to start this episode with…that by the way I’ll return back to throughout the episode and no doubt annoy some of you with it along the way, ay just doing my job…but it is a CRUCIAL piece of information that we NEED to remember if we want to understand where Alasdair MacIntyre is STARTING his THINKING from…for the rest of his work.
A BIG POINT, that’ll GROUND all the rest he has to say…is that there IS no, VIEW FROM NOWHERE…when it comes to STATEMENTS that we make about morality or value. That is something we need to remember as a guarantee… of what we even mean when we’re TALKING about morality as a concept.
And you know, it’s EASY to forget that this is the premise he’s always operating from, but just remember all we talked about LAST time when we went over his book After Virtue.
That WHEN we try to REMOVE teleology from moral discussion, or any SHARED ideas about WHAT a human life is FOR…in other words when a view from nowhere becomes your biggest goal in moral conversation…then what we end up with…is something like a hellscape of emotivism. Kind of world we live in today, he thinks. A world where people in GOOD faith, OFTEN have, what LOOKS like moral conversation…but they almost always end up with something at the end of it…that is deeply unsatisfying and barely productive.
Moral conversation becomes incommensurable he says… without a shared conception of the good.
And if this is what he tried to DIAGNOSE about the world in After Virtue…then what he tries to do in the NEXT two books he writes, what we’re talking about today… is him giving a much more DETAILED account of how exactly this process goes on.
How whenever someone makes a moral claim in ANY capacity…it REQUIRES them to be MAKING it…from a HOST of assumptions that are completely unavoidable. Assumptions we largely inherit from our education, and don’t really THINK about. Again, the PREMISE being that morality is NEVER something that comes from a view from nowhere…and it’s NEVER something that is value NEUTRAL.
And he says if you wanted evidence of this, if you just zoomed out…and you LOOKED, at MOST of the moral conversation that’s going on from the most PRESTIGIOUS levels of the university today, all the way to the most serious, moral discussions between everyday people…there are three, dominant, SETS of ASSUMPTIONS you will see in the world, that have emerged HISTORICALLY, that people are bringing INTO these moral conversations, whether they realize it or not.
He calls them one: the encyclopedic viewpoint. Two, the genealogical viewpoint. And three the tradition based viewpoint. Three RIVAL, versions of moral enquiry, you could say…which also happens to be the title of the book.
We’re gonna talk about all of them today and where they come from. And we’ll talk about how EACH of these not only have their own sort vibe to them, each of these have their own strengths and weaknesses, and ultimately by the end of the episode we’ll understand why Macintyre has a VERY strong preference for ONE of these viewpoints, over the other two.
We’ll ALSO see today how he thinks that WHEN two people SEEM to disagree on a moral issue…say one person is FOR abortion and one person is AGAINST it…it may SEEM like they disagree at the level of their actual positions…but many of the deepest, most culture-defining disagreements are ACTUALLY occurring at a deeper level, in the very criteria these people use to form their arguments.
Anyway, let’s get STARTED on all that though… and let's begin with explaining these three rival versions of moral enquiry, and start with what he calls the Encyclopedic viewpoint…because it’s maybe the most common one that you’ll see in today’s world.
The name, Encyclopedic…is a reference by Macintyre to a particular set of assumptions people bring into things, that can be CLEARLY seen in the 9th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, released in the late 1800’s.
LOT of things here that’ll sound pretty familiar to you…because it's honestly the way MANY of us have been trained to think about things.
The Encyclopedic view… is the CLOSEST thing we get…to an approach that REALLY believes it’s OPERATING from a view from nowhere. One way to think of it… is that its a pretty scientific way of looking at things…where the same logic, for how we try to be neutral, in the lab and use a method to arrive at better and better FACTS about the universe…that SAME approach apparently needs to get applied… to the way they think we should be handling our MORAL questions.
For example, say a moral dilemma presents itself in a moment…and what does the Encyclopedist, think we should do.
Well, you gather all the facts about the situation you can…you define the terms you’re gonna be debating about…you clarify whatever concepts are involved…you TRANSLATE your disagreement into a common language…and the assumption is that if everyone is being reasonable and they’re coming to the conversation in good faith…well then with enough TIME gone by of us doing this… we should all start having, better and better conversations, the QUALITY of our concepts should improve gradually, and eventually a kind of rational CONVERGENCE will happen…where ANYONE whose THINKING in the right way…will move towards the same moral answers, to the same moral questions.
Moral disagreements between people then, under THIS logic…become SOMETHING like, just a technical problem, to Macintyre.
If two people don’t see eye to eye on something… one of them must just have bad information…they must have bad arguments at some level, personal bias they can’t see past…and if we could just get everybody into the SAME room looking at the exact SAME EVIDENCE…then we have EVERY reason to expect that the world of moral discussion will start to look less like a bunch of rival camps screaming at each other talking PAST each other…and MORE like a single, shared, HUMAN project, that’s slowly improving over time with rationality.
What Macintyre would want to point out right at the start here is: notice…how morality under this set of assumptions…becomes basically a matter of rules and obligations we reason to…where the CLAIM is that we didn’t ASSUME anything in order to GET to them.
Now remember, the title of the book was THREE Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, and that this Encyclopedic viewpoint is only one of them.
Well, for the sake of EXPLAINING this in a way that gets us closer to how MACINTYRE’s viewing these things…I’d like to invite you to think of these three approaches, as effectively…Three Rival Civilizations, we’re talking about here. EACH of which having their OWN distinct IDENTITY that matters to them a LOT.
And to Macintyre…if we HAD to talk about the identity of the Encyclopedic civilization in particular…well, it's a very STRANGE, kind of moral tradition all things considered. UNIQUE, I guess is the HR friendly way of phrasing it. Cause think about it this is a civilization… where a KEY piece of their whole moral identity…is that they don’t really HAVE a moral identity.
They might say look we’re not MAKING, the same kinds of assumptions as someone like an Aristotle for example. I mean THAT guy…HE talks about morality, and he has ALL SORTS of precanned ideas he brings INTO it…that SHADE the entire way he’s THINKING about it. For example he has a whole picture of what he thinks a human being even IS…of what a life is for, of what counts as flourishing…and all of this stuff is ROOTED in standards of evidence he had that are not only ANCIENT…but he PULLS all these assumptions from things foundational to HIS culture. What a COINCIDENCE they might say.
And look, that whole thing he’s doing…is part of what we try to NOT do here in the Encyclopedic civilization…morality should be something that’s true, REGARDLESS of whatever culture you come from…I mean give us enough time with a moral issue…and ANY right thinking rational AGENT…would have to AGREE that what we’re saying is VALID.
But again for Macintyre…there IS no view from nowhere when you’re doing morality.
BECAUSE he’d say…the Encyclopedic set of assumptions…ALSO smuggles in standards that it operates by. Notice how it magically BEGINS with the idea…that morality is fundamentally about laws, or obligations or duties. Notice the assumption that virtue…is for the MOST part a disposition by someone, to be able to FOLLOW those rules consistently. Notice the assumption that a normal, everyday person…not only has ACCESS to the knowledge required to LIVE a life of virtue, but also the rational capacity to get better. Notice how this civilization assumes that philosophy’s job, is to SYSTEMATIZE this moral knowledge, or at the very least to remove confusion about it. And maybe most importantly: notice the assumption… that there can BE some sort of moral consensus, practically on the level of a universal…where a disagreement that persists in a moral discussion…that’s not a normal PIECE of what moral discussion is…it must be some kind of confusion or ignorance at some level.
Now that’s a lot of assumptions, for a civilization that is SUPPOSEDLY starting from a view from nowhere. Aren’t they SMUGGLING these things in not unlike the example of Aristotle?
Except to Macintyre that’s the whole THING: when you’re NOT a member of this Encyclopedic civilization…NONE of this going on in Aristotle… is seen as smuggling in ANYTHING. There’s no smuggling. You’re not doing something WRONG by having standards you adhere to. You’re just ENGAGING in what morality IS, and has always been.
Once again the only way this would even be WEIRD to you… is if a piece of your identity, was that you don’t really HAVE an identity in this way.
Several examples we can GIVE of these Encyclopedic assumptions being applied to the ideas that shape our world…and for Macintyre one of the most USEFUL examples of this, one that he dedicates a good deal of time to in his work just because of its popularity, is Enlightenment Liberalism.
See as MUCH as Liberalism might like to claim that it is ALL about individual, rational agents, ACTING on their own, CHOOSING whatever values matter to THEM…Liberalism ALSO, like EVERYTHING ELSE…has a standard for what they think a human being is for, of what counts as flourishing…Liberalism ALSO had standards of evidence they use, standards of what even counts as a valid reason to believe something at all…more than that they also cite the foundational the texts of Liberalism, and they even have an origin story rooted in history.
Is this SO different… from what Aristotle was doing, he might ask.
Now KNOWING all this he says… the real question just becomes to a citizen of a liberal society: how self aware are you of all these assumptions that you’re bringing IN?
I mean if there’s no view from nowhere, truly…then you can understand how this looks from Macintyre’s perspective…this is a civilization of people…that for interesting reasons constantly need to believe they’re operating from a view from nowhere.
And if THIS was the moral tradition you used to try to come up with moral guidance during times of crisis…the next thing to consider is: what sorts of PROBLEMS, might a PERSON run into if they used this method? But more importantly: what sorts of problems might a civilization like this run into…if again, in real time, THIS is the strategy it USED to try to solve the moral ISSUES its dealing with?
Well, HISTORY may have already answered this question FOR us.
That civilization may find itself…INCAPABLE of real moral leadership… during times of crisis like, say, leading up to the second world war … it would BE this way… because you’d have no real moral tradition to stand on to give a strong critique to rival viewpoints.
Maybe in THAT world it just becomes a place… where whoever can manage to seize POWER for a time, however they manage to do it…giving into them just becomes the fate of Encyclopedic civilization. Because they have no method to disagree with ANYONE in a strong enough way.
MORE than that…maybe if you had no shared concept of what human beings are for…maybe this kind of civilization…. would find itself with its government institutions turning to mostly bureaucracy, or technical procedures. Maybe a society like this turns overly litigious because of this fact.
Most of all though for Macintyre: maybe moral conversation in these cultures…starts to become something that is MOSTLY just, performative.
Where you know, two really smart people will come together, the audience gets EXCITED that we’re gonna finally see these two intellectuals CLASH and we’re gonna get CLOSER to moral answers in a way that’s satisfying…but instead, they just spend two hours talking past each other…making ZERO HEADWAY…and what’s worse for Macintyre: the people LIVING in this kind of moral tradition…actually learn to ACCEPT this outcome, and not be disappointed when things are so unproductive. They just sit around after the debate holding a towel, dabbing their head like a baptist preacher going well I’m a little confused about what happened there…but uh, at LEAST we TRIED, right? Maybe ONE day we’ll find that view from nowhere, and rational CONVERGENCE will just come together for us.
But as we know by now… NEVER gonna happen in the eyes of Macintyre. Because the entire viewpoint, and the UNIQUE set of ASSUMPTIONS that was at its base the WHOLE TIME…makes it IMPOSSIBLE to adjudicate between rival moral claims. The aspiration for value neutrality…led to a lack of self awareness…which then led to all these problems.
Okay so if the Encyclopedic view is the FIRST one of these in the book…let’s move onto the SECOND moral tradition that in MANY ways has come about because it’s so critical of the Encyclopedic view…this one is called the Genealogical viewpoint.
Many of you will be familiar with Nietzsche’s genealogy of morality, or maybe Foucault’s genealogy of criminal punishment or sexuality that he did…the point for Macintyre is that the genealogical viewpoint asks a COMPLETELY different set of QUESTIONS about morality…because they view the what morality IS in a totally different way.
See, ANY idea they would say, that ANYONE has about morality…has emerged historically, from FORMER ideas, that we can do the work and literally trace the history of. You can see RIGHT where they came from. Where ELSE would they have come from?
And if this was your VIEW point…then the NEW question becomes: when we’re doing morality, what does a VALID moral question even start to LOOK like?
Well, it’s certainly not…what is objectively RIGHT, written into the universe. It’s not what IS REAL human flourishing, or what’s a NEUTRAL moral conclusion we all can arrive at together holding hands, jump roping.
No, morality in THIS viewpoint…. becomes MORE questions like: what ideas LED to these OTHER moral ideas that we see today. Can we trace them through history? How do they function, in relation to OTHER ideas that are going on: but probably MOST importantly to them… who in a position of power they often ask… currently BENEFITS from these ideas being the current dominant way of thinking about things? Also no doubt, who becomes a VICTIM, when whatever CURRENT set of ideas ARE the dominant ways of thinking about things?
By the way…Macintyre would say NOTICE so far…how all of this genealogical view…is ALSO built on a HOST of assumptions about what human flourishing is, what counts as evidence, what counts as a valid reason to BELIEVE something at all…again there IS no view from nowhere when we’re making these sorts of moral claims. It’s JUST a matter of how AWARE you are of the leaps you’ve made to GET here.
Now seeing how CRITICAL the genealogical civilization is as it’s CORE…you can start to imagine how THIS civilization…might start viewing the encyclopedic civilization as pretty delusional.
I mean from THEIR point of view: you know, when these people think they’re just gathering evidence, neutrally clarifying their concepts and arriving at better and better moral answers…these are people that are COMPLETELY IGNORANT…to the REAL historical origins of where their morality actually COMES from. It’s also a civilization it seems…that completely WASTES their TIME…DREAMING of having THE correct ANSWER to a moral question, when it’s CLEAR that something like that doesn’t even exist.
And this level of critique… is CERTAINLY something that Macintyre appreciated…but he thought the genealogical approach, AS a moral tradition…it fails in practice, for perhaps even WORSE reasons than the encyclopedic one does at times.
BECAUSE the genealogical view is ROOTED in CRITIQUE…it often gets STUCK in the mode of critique…and can’t OFFER sufficient ANSWERS to anything, without ultimately consuming itself.
And if you think about it…JUST like we imagined EARLIER with the encyclopedic approach…can you imagine all the real world PROBLEMS the genealogical civilization might run INTO…if THIS was the moral tradition they tried to use to solve crises as they arise?
What do two intellectuals trying to have a public DEBATE look like, under this logic?
Is it productive?
Is this an approach that can give moral ANSWERS when society needs them? What problems do the CITIZENS of this kind of society ultimately run into?
One example Macintyre explores in the book for an answer to that LAST question…is a person who questions things about their IDENTITY.
Take ANY example of how society gives people these IDENTITY boxes they gotta fall into…and picture any example of someone who thinks these are historically constructed, a bit too narrow, and they decide that they’re not going to deny their own inner complexity…just to fit into the IDENTITIES they’ve been given to CHOOSE from.
Okay, well Macintyre on one level… would say he APPRECIATES the level of critique going on there when it comes to these categories. This CERTAINLY isn’t someone falling into the trap of the encyclopedic viewpoint, more power TO you.
But he says NOTICE… how this logic ultimately has to CONSUME itself, and can’t practically function, if the person decides to remain consistent.
Because if someone says I’m not going to conform to these identity boxes…I’m going to trace their historical origins and REIMAGINE my identity in a new light…well NOW you’ve just replaced ONE identity box…with ANOTHER identity box that YOU’VE created.
And unless if at that point…you’re willing to just live the rest of your life in contradiction, you decide you’re just done trying to THINK about stuff…you INEVITABLY…now have to examine this NEW identity box, and trace ITS historical roots in your own mind. It TOO has it’s OWN functions and power relations that you’d have to discover. At which point ostensibly, you’d have to create a NEW identity…and then THAT one needs to be traced to understand its origins.
In other words: citizens of a truly genealogical civilization would be CONSTANTLY undermining the very SELF they were trying to liberate. Being STUCK in the mode of critique… leaves someone in a place where they can do NOTHING but self consume. Imagine how maddening it would be to try to live in that place. Eventually you’d need SOME sort of foundation to build a life from…or else you wouldn’t have a life.
And if it’s not clear: this person is a METAPHOR…for what MORAL conversation becomes in the genealogical moral tradition as well. For Macintyre, Genealogy presents itself as LIBERATION from some STORY you’ve been CAPTURED by…but you can’t offer satisfying ANSWERS to moral questions… if you’re CONSTANTLY in the business of unmasking the story that people believe in.
Now this is a PERFECT moment…to talk about one of the biggest points Alasdair Macintyre makes in the book.
Mentioned it at the beginning of the episode…he says it’s SO COMMON in the modern world…when we SEE a moral debate going on…to THINK that what’s going on are that two people disagreeing about the different moral CONCLUSIONS they’ve arrived at.
But the REALITY is, he makes the case…they’re REALLY disagreeing at this more FUNDAMENTAL level we’ve been talking about the whole episode.
Quick example of this. Imagine a debate going on between a person from the Encyclopedic civilization on one side…and the genealogical on the other. And imagine them debating something like…SHOULD a college campus…BAN a speaker from coming to speak…because they’ve engaged in HATE speech, online. Seems like one we may have seen before.
Now it SEEMS on the SURFACE… like these two people are disagreeing at the level of their moral conclusions…meaning ONE of these people thinks we SHOULDN’T ban them…the OTHER person thinks we SHOULD.
But the REAL, DEEPER layer that this moral disagreement is HAPPENING on…is again at the level of these assumptions. The Encyclopedist…treats the ENTIRE moral QUESTION…as something that should be solved through that public, impersonal method that they like to use.
So how do they debate? Well, first they define their terms, they ask what IS hate speech?
Then they gather evidence, they ask WILL banning this person actually reduce harm on campus?
Then they apply some set of rights or duties to the question, they ask how do we figure what our obligation is to reduce harm while STILL allowing for other goods?
And then they expect that the OTHER person, as long as they’re thinking rationally along with them… should be able to agree with them if they’ve presented the evidence and stuck to a nice set of rules centered around reducing harm. Maybe they decide…that we SHOULDN’T ban this person, in FAVOR of a higher good.
Now the genealogist on the other hand…they’re entire APPROACH, would be indistinguishable from this…see, they would be STARTING from a place…where they’re skeptical of the entire language that frames the question itself.
They might think…you know, these words like harm, or dignity, or safety… these are FAR from things we can just reason to a definition of…we’ve inherited our definitions of these things from power structures, that we KNOW were not the GREATEST. What kind of person sits around thinking its productive to try to define these things…and what are they REALLY trying to accomplish underneath that? How might they be being USED by forces they don’t totally understand?
Then they might be looking at the FUNCTION of the event itself…they might ask what does invoking harm to students, in ANY capacity, then ALLOW for administrators to potentially do in the future?
They might then consider: let’s say this person comes on campus and gives a speech…well who gains POWER…from this event going on at all? Who becomes VULNERABLE from this event going on?
In other words for Macintyre: when you pay close attention to the WAY the moral arguments are being made here…to Macintyre the REAL LOCATION, of this moral disagreement going on…are in these underlying assumptions…what counts as morality, what counts as evidence, what counts as a decisive reason or for what human life is even FOR.
Again, we get so DISTRACTED, by the SURFACE level differences between the moral conclusions…that for Macintyre it stops us from examining the REAL place our moral disagreements are happening.
Now before we move on…quick, 30 second point I want to make here for long time listeners of the show, and people already knowledgeable about philosophy. Certainly don’t want to alienate anyone just getting into this stuff, but there’s an important point that needs to be made here that can help us PLACE Alasdair Macintyre as a thinker.
Notice, how the Encyclopedic view, SEEMS to have a lot of parallels with modernism. And notice how the genealogical view, SEEMS to have a lot of parallels with post-structuralism, or post-modernism.
To be clear… this isn’t how Macintyre HIMSELF is framing it in the book…but this is a really useful shorthand I think when trying to understand where HE fits into the story of philosophy.
And that’s because the THIRD viewpoint we’re going to be talking about today… is something that probably MOST resembles PRE-modern thought. And Macintyre himself, as a big FAN of this third way of approaching morality…Macintyre is going to end up being a very UNIQUE blend of pre-modern and post-structuralist thought, that you REALLY don’t see almost EVER in a thinker. Anyway, I just personally think this is helpful to consider if nothing else.
So anyway, there’s the encyclopedic, the genealogical and now the THIRD way of thinking he says you’ll see OUT there in all the moral discussions you’re having…is what he calls the tradition based view of morality.
But right off the bat… I wanna caution anyone listening to not be thrown off too much by the name. This is not going to be Macintyre saying… that you should follow a tradition, just cause it’s what worked for your grandma or something. In fact it’s gonna be CLOSER to the OPPOSITE of that.
The tradition based view of morality…BEGINS from the place…that ANY time you’re doing morality in ANY capacity…you are doing so from within a way of life.
Meaning from within this logic…it’s understood, that you are always inside of a language, and a set of institutions… you’re inside of a set of assumptions like we’ve already laid out for the other two approaches.
And an important PIECE of this that will call back to the end of After Virtue and what we talked about last episode: whenever you make a moral claim… you are DOING so from within shared practices and communities, that PRODUCE a particular kind of person. This is VERY important to Macintyre.
Because WHEN you start to VIEW morality through this lens…the way moral discourse often LOOKS…starts to make a lot more sense. When morality is something absolutely INSEPARABLE from questions like what is a human being for….then the PICTURE of what morality is…becomes the cultivation of whatever virtues, are gonna produce a person who HAS good judgement.
Now consider the difference there compared to the last two approaches we’ve laid out. Being moral…isn’t about deciding on what your moral rules are…and then working hard to consistently stick to them, like in the encyclopedic.
Morality is NOT just unmasking the function and power dynamics of the things you think are good, like in the genealogical.
Morality in the TRADITION based view…is the FORMATION of a person…where KNOWING your PARTICULAR community and shared practices, and ALL those assumptions that underlie your thinking…becoming FAMILIAR with those things, PRODUCES a person where when they’re in a moment, where they need to make a difficult moral decision…this will BE a person who can personally, make a good judgement in that scenario…without even NEEDING a set of rules to follow.
Couple quick things Macintyre would wanna point out. First of all, this view of morality MUCH more resembles Aristotle, than it does Enlightenment Liberalism. That’s just a fact. Secondly, this view produces people who are CAPABLE of good judgement, RATHER than people that are on some fake quest to find some view from nowhere about the human good. Or some set of universals. Lastly, this view from Macintyre: just seems to correspond, SO much BETTER…with the ACTUAL activity that’s going ON, when two different cultures are screaming at each other about what the right thing to DO is.
Both sides are coming from different sets of assumptions, communities and shared practices that they are ALWAYS EMBEDDED IN. The logic of their claims…doesn’t make SENSE outside of that context. Why not EMBRACE that that is ALWAYS something that’s going on?
Now a criticism, that almost every smart person I’ve ever talked to about Macintyre brings up right away…is how is what he’s saying here…not just the same as moral relativism?
I mean if knowing my OWN moral tradition’s conception of the good is what morality IS…then isn’t ANY tradition, EQUALLY valid to any OTHER tradition? And wouldn’t the encyclopedic thinkers, just need to become more self aware of what they’re DOING, and then THEIR approach, would be MAGICALLY just as good as any other!
The answer is of course NO from Macintyre. And his REASONING for this…is something we’ve actually already been alluding to throughout the entire episode. He thinks that not all moral traditions…equally ACCOMPLISH, what we want moral traditions to DO for us.
First things first, moral traditions DO serve multiple, important purposes for us. As already mentioned we need them to be able to provide real answers when a crisis inevitably hits, we need them to be able to contend with contradictions that go on INTERNALLY with the people that are PART of the tradition…we need them to be able to survive critique from OTHER approaches, to not just EXCLUDE outside ideas. We need them to be able to INTEGRATE…GOOD ideas from OTHER traditions, while still being able to SPOT the weaknesses in other RIVAL conceptions of the good. We need them to ACTUALLY be effective at FORMING, moral SUBJECTS within them. Or else what’s the point of ANY of this?
Now ALL of these things COMBINED to Macintyre…they create a kind of “stress-test” that goes on in the REAL world. And not every moral tradition out there ACCOMPLISHES these things… at the same level. SOME moral traditions when these stresses are PLACED on them…they DESTROY themselves, or can do NOTHING. And his POINT is insofar, as a moral tradition CAN’T accomplish these things…Macintyre has NO problem saying that it is just WORSE, as a moral tradition.
So it’s not that liberalism, CAN’T POSSIBLY FUNCTION, as a moral tradition for a time. He just thinks it’s bad at DOING certain things that we NEED our moral approach to accomplish for us…and in that way it’s just WORSE than other approaches. There are of course…far more EXTREME examples you can apply this to…a culture that doesn’t educate half its citizens…a culture that cordones off certain groups and castigates them for societies problems…the examples of how we can do this scorekeeping, become almost endless.
And what you’re LEFT with he thinks after HE goes through this process…is the moral tradition that he will unapologetically make a CASE for IN his later work… what he thinks is the BEST moral tradition that has ever EXISTED based on these criteria: Aristotelean Thomism, or a late middle ages, early renaissance version of thought that fuses the work of Aristotle, and St. Thomas Aquinas.
We’ll certainly talk more about it in the next couple episodes.
But IF we accept this as a reasonable argument from Macintyre…then what would be the important, practical implications of this on the world we live in?
Well one IMPORTANT thing is that when you’re viewing morality through the tradition based lens…it just changes, fundamentally what moral conversation, and debate even LOOKS like.
Just as a point of contrast…consider what the average debate looks like these days on the internet.
Now of COURSE we know these are people operating from a TOTALLY different set of PREMISES than Macintyre is.
So what you GET… are people that usually, never even really TRY to understand their opponents perspective. Their job is just to WIN. Either make the other person look stupid…come up with the best BAR that DUNKS on your opponent. At BEST what you get in these things usually are people trying to point out WHERE their opponent might have bad information, or ARGUMENTS that aren’t very strong. You know, classic encyclopedic framing approaches.
But under the TRADITION based world view everything changes. Because if the premise is that EVERYONE…is MAKING every moral claim from WITHIN a set of practices, communities and assumptions that underlie a moral tradition…well then for Macintyre: PROPER, moral debate… HAS to be something that goes ON from a place…where someone’s done a LOT of work BEFOREHAND…to understand the opposing person’s set of assumptions…at LEAST as well as THEY do.
In other words, somebody knowledgeable about how morality actually functions…would understand WHERE the moral disagreement is TRULY located…and for THAT person, PERSUASION in something like a DEBATE, would require them to KNOW the opposing set of assumptions so WELL…that they can point out to the OTHER person the WEAKNESSES and contradictions of their approach…and how MY approach does all the jobs we want moral traditions to DO for us…better.
That…takes a lot of work. For Macintyre…there’s not a low barrier to ENTRY, if you REALLY want to change someone’s MIND. If all you want to do is make them feel stupid then it’s INCREDIBLY easy to get in. And Macintyre will go on to say for the REST of his work…that the university setting becomes a TRAINING ground we have in the modern world… for teaching young people to NOT have this kind of respect for other ideas.
Next episode we’re going to talk about a change that goes on in his thinking…where he moves away from some of the stuff he said about morality in After Virtue…and presents an entirely new PICTURE of what a human is…that will no doubt get you QUESTIONING…a lot of the modern ways we treat people.
Hope this got you thinking in a slightly different way. Patreon.com/philosophizethis, writing on Substack and as always thank you for listening. Talk to you next time.
